I write on fiscal and economic policy issues at all levels of government. Areas of particular interest for me include tax policy, entitlements and public employee compensation. In addition to Forbes, I contribute periodically to National Review Online, City Journal and the New York Daily News. Previously, I was a commercial real estate finance analyst at Wells Fargo. I hold a Bachelor's Degree from Harvard College.

After John Derbyshire

I’m pleased to see that National Reviewhas fired John Derbyshire as a result of his racist screed in Taki’s Magazine last week. Derbyshire’s remarks were beyond the pale, and this severing of ties is important for the credibility of one of the pillar institutions in conservative publishing.

Some observers on the Left have noted, with a certain amount of glee, that some commenters at NRO are up in arms about the firing. Robert Farley concludes that NR’s editors are “out-of-sync with their readership” and Matt Yglesias says “National Review readers dislike Lowry’s effort to disavow Derbyshire.” These conclusions are unwarranted.

It’s important to remember that Internet commenters are the scum of the earth. Personally, I had to debate whether to delete the racist responses to my Derbyshire post on Friday, since that would have entailed deleting essentially all the comments. (Well, all except the guy who wanted to yell at me for making fun of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC on Saturday; he’s not a racist, and his Olbermann-esque umbrage was pretty hilarious.)

I ended up deciding to leave up racist comments that I thought were interesting as examples of how Derbyshire’s views are defended, while deleting anything along the lines of “black people are savages” or similar. Though there were a lot of comments and it’s likely I missed something.

The vast majority of blog readers don’t write comments, and I wouldn’t assume that my commenters are reflective of my reader base, any more than the cesspit that was often Yglesias’s comments section at ThinkProgress reflected his reader base. The same is true for NRO.

That said, there are obviously some NR readers who liked Derbyshire and liked his racism, and who will be annoyed that he is gone. But so what? The point of running an opinion magazine isn’t to maximize your readership or make as much money as you can. If NR is alienating part of its reader base by firing a writer who undermines its credibility, all that means is that NR will be a better publication with a better readership, and the firing reflects well on NR‘s priorities.

But this is just one step on a road for conservative writers and publications to earn credibility on race. The right’s main race problem isn’t hit-you-over-the-head racism like Derbyshire’s—though it does exist, most prominently in the form of Rush Limbaugh.

The key problem is one I discussed two weeks ago—that many conservatives have responded to decades of (perceived and actual) race hucksterism from the Left by essentially insisting that black people in America today have no special, valid policy concerns. They look at Trayvon Martin and all they can see is Tawana Brawley.

The irony here is that the politics of racial grievance have actually been in sharp decline on the Left over the last two decades, but many conservatives haven’t gotten the memo. One favored refrain of Derbyshire’s defenders has been “What about Marion Barry?” since Barry made offensive remarks last week about invasive Asian small business people exploiting the residents of the heavily black neighborhoods he represents.

Well, what about Marion Barry? Prominent Democratic officials at both the city and national levels have denounced his comments. He’s the duly elected City Council member from Washington, D.C.’s Ward 8, so we can’t fire him. But Barry is basically a marginal political figure in Washington, widely regarded as a crank, and without much actual influence in policymaking. Barry will never be elected mayor again, and neither will somebody like Barry.

Similarly, a lot of conservatives get put on tilt by Al Sharpton—why does he get away with so much?—but the fact is that Sharpton is far less influential than he once was. Aside from the fact that “Al Sharpton Did It Too” isn’t an excuse for anything, it’s a huge error to look at the Martin case and see Sharpton or figures like him as the prime movers behind the public reaction.

Jim Antle has some good points here. He caricatures the views of both conservatives and liberals too much—do many people on either side really believe that “white racism explains the overwhelming majority of black social problems” or that “white racism doesn’t exist”?—but he’s right that conservatives have erred by responding to what they see as race hucksterism by dismissing out of hand substantially all concerns about anti-black racism.

That’s both a substantive error and a strategic error, and one that goes way beyond people like Derbyshire. Making this error isn’t necessarily racist. But correcting it is necessary in order to discuss race and racism seriously.

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